The Left-Hand Path: eMusic's "Digital Mystery School"

If one were to look at eMusic's spoken-word section from an esoteric perspective, sifting through the speeches and poetry, they would be left with some golden nuggets of wisdom — some darker than others, yet all of them perfect additions to what I call the "digital mystery school." If one were to make a pilgrimage through this virtual temple, sorting through the various levels of initiation and revelation, how would it look? Who would be the various teachers on the way? Let's enter the temple together, beginning our journey on what I'd like to call The Left-Handed Path.

The Left-Handed Path

This is the journey where intuition reigns over logic and experience. Here is where we encounter The Scholar and High Priest of the left-handed path, William Burroughs. On Bill Laswell's Hashisheen, Burroughs arises like a flinty sphinx, the oracular voice of a disembodied presence. While the majority of the track belongs to Iggy Pop and his rumination of Hasan I Sabbah, The Great Hashisheen, it's Burroughs lines from his famous treatise on the path of wisdom and magic that call us into the first chamber of the temple; "Danger is a biologic necessity for men that sleep in dreams. If you face death without dying for a period of direct confrontation, you are immortal. For the western middle classes, danger is a rarity, and erupts with a sudden, random, shock. Yet we are all in danger at all times, since our death exists; it is written, waiting to present the aspect of surprised recognition. Is there a technique for confronting death without any immediate, physical danger? Can one reach The Western Lands without physical death?"

This is the essence of the left-handed path distilled: a path of transformation, a dying to one's self without dying. There's a correlative: in The Great Pyramid, every pilgrim would have to navigate the inner chambers — some of which were filled with water — forcing the pilgrim to submerge and then re-emerge in a dry antechamber, where the next stage of the initiation would begin. If they were unable to solve the geomantic riddle, and were therefore unable to swim to the correct chamber, they would find themselves in the wrong place, confronted by venomous asps – thus ending their journey. Burroughs, a crypto-Gnostic, is referring to a similar ritualistic episode acted out in our own lives where he asks the question, "How do we move to other states of consciousness, by dying without dying?" In Giza they worked this out. If one could not breathe deep enough, and swim through the right channel into the correct chamber, they were done and even if they did, the immersion in darkness, doubt and fear, let alone lack of oxygen would be the initiation into near death and there were no second chances.

In The Chamber Of The Pharaoh

Here we encounter three high magi of the left-handed path: Aleister Crowley, Tim Leary and Genesis P'Orridge. In many ways, they're all part of the same occult bloodline and continuum. Crowley was born on October 12th and Leary on October 11th, so certainly they are, at the very least, close enough to be time twins. Their impact on a series of generations cannot be underestimated. Also, both were purported to have links to intelligence agencies as well: Crowley with MI 6 and Leary with the CIA. In keeping with our pyramid/chamber/initiation theme, Crowley supposedly spent his wedding night in The Great Pyramid, where he made contact with a spirit that instilled within him the teachings of The OTO, Crowley's mystery school. On The Black Magic Recordings, a tinny and scratchy recording courtesy of Cleopatra Records, Crowley is in full beast mode, invoking the entities on "The Pentagram" and "Excerpts From A Gnostic Mass." While it might be difficult to glean much in the way of articulate information, there is certainly an eerie spirit captured in the magnetic resonance of these recordings. With repeated listens, some form of subtle transmission will emerge.

While Crowley invokes the spirits that will bind with your essence, on the classic Smithsonian Folkways recording, The Psychedelic Experience, Tim Leary awaits to guide you deeper into the realms of "Going Out" and "Coming Back." While Leary may or may not have been a knowing or unknowing shill for MK Ultra, his treatise on the death of the ego based upon The Tibetan Book Of The Dead is a perfect set of instructions to embrace the left-handed path. Turning off the mind and entering into what Byron Gysin called "The Third Mind" is paramount if one is to stay in the flow of the left-handed path. Leary is here to play the role of an initiatory presence on this dark journey through fear and unknowing, familiarizing the psyche with nothingness, fueled by the energy of a synthesized rye mold. Once LSD entered the culture, the Eleusis, so eagerly sought after by the ancients, became available to all. Aldous Huxley's soma was a weekend trip to the galaxy. Viewed by the mainstream as an unholy sacrament — and nowadays a Class Three substance — it is the holy ghost of the left-handed path and Leary its high priest and psychic Magellan. But what does it mean to us in a post-psychedelic and post-modern world? Here is where we meet with the modern beast, or maybe more appropriately, "beastess," given his modified sex-change, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.

Into Thee Temple OV Psychic Truth

GPO, as he is occasionally known, has been practicing sonic rituals since the early days of his band, Throbbing Gristle. Ironically, since the left-handed path is almost always identified with the feminine, it seems utterly appropriate that GPO would embody its spirit by undergoing extensive body modification to create one androgynous being with his partner, Jacqueline Breyer (he now refers to himself as Genesis Breyer P'Orridge). On Thee Fractured Garden, P'Orridge becomes the occult fusion of Leary and Crowley, taking the adept on a psychedelic journey into the realm of "The Avatar." He takes a Leary-like spin on when "Does MIND Leave?" exploring the brain/mind connection and what survives beyond death. He arrives at a similar place that Burroughs does with the opening of "The Western Lands," wanting to experience the loss of body without permanently discarding it from this mortal coil. Like Burroughs, he wants to die without dying. This was a period when P'Orridge was deeply influenced by ecstasy, reportedly consuming it on a daily basis. While LSD was Leary's sacrament, for GPO it was "E." He even has a laments on its inability to take him to a new and sustained realm of consciousness on "E Was A Mirage." Here, GPO maps out one of the pitfalls and missteps of the left-handed path, which was concurrently taking place in his own life at nearly the exact same time.

Right around the release of Thee Fractured Garden, GPO was staying at Rick Rubin's mansion, a haunted old place once owned by Harry Houdini. Bowie, in his most out-of-body phase as The Great White Duke, spent some time there. It was at Rubin's haunt that GPO was caught in a fire in the guesthouse while hanging out with Love and Rockets. He escaped, but not without serious injuries to his wrist and ribs. He also suffered an embolism. GPO sued Rubin and American Recordings and won $1.5 million dollars in a court settlement. While the left-handed path has its peril, it also looks like it can be profitable in modern-day America.

Controversy has followed P'Orridge like a dark shadow throughout his career. GPO was away in Nepal when materials of a pornographic nature involving children were found at his house. He claimed to have never owned them, but didn't set foot in England again and instead wound up moving to Sebastopol to become a neighbor of another high priest of the left-handed path, Terrence McKenna.

DMT Lives In Your Third Eye

McKenna rests atop the pyramid of the third mind. He is the psychonautic sage that embodies qualities of Leary, Crowley and GPO. McKenna's method to open the gates of wisdom was simple: consume copious amounts of psilocybin and take the occasional reality-warping dose of DMT. For McKenna, these entheogens were both his passport to and teachers in other dimensions — the death and loss-of-self that Burroughs alludes to is carried out with psychic abandon by McKenna. Unlike Burroughs, who tried yage — a cousin of DMT that contains harmaline — the psychoactive agent of DMT, McKenna wasn't afraid of the other dimensions. When Burroughs traveled to Mexico to take yage, he made contact with an insectoid-intelligence. This contact led to perhaps his finest work, Naked Lunch. But once he tasted the fear and strange visions of yage, he never returned to the drug.

Not so McKenna. He was interested in going as far and deep as the substances could take him. Currently, the only recording of McKenna on eMusic is his classic rant "Re: Evolution" from The Shamen Collection. While it is certainly brief when compared to McKenna's series of tomes like Invisible Landscapes, and Archaic Revival, it nonetheless offers a potent sample of his vision, one in which we are intimately familiar with the mysteries of creation and yet still somehow at play within them — not channeling and entrapping them in some occult fashion. In McKenna's universe, the left-handed path has no end, and is a constant source of novelty and becoming.

Here is where knowledge both resides and begins.The left-handed path is lunar, dark and intuitive. It invites mystery, courts chaos, seeks out strange attraction, becomes intimate with the inexplicable and unexplainable, is a system without a system, ends, or means. It can result in psychic obliteration, destruction of self, even death. But it can also take one out of the context of their third-dimensional axis and realize themselves out of the yoke of space and time.

The right-handed path is solar, masculine and seeks a systemized solution to understanding, mapping and bridling the chaotic energy of becoming. More control-oriented in its perspective, it is the codification of the psyche into formalized traditions and more steadied attempts at reaching the peaks of spiritual wisdom and experience. We'll take that journey next time in eMusic's digital mystery school.